The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (447 page)

Roosevelt’s execution of his strategy could generously be described as petty, mean-spirited, and conducted at his friend’s expense. Roosevelt’s behavior “shocked Churchill,” but underlying his actions, Jacob wrote, was “a superficial” and “dangerous” understanding of Russia’s “age-long goals in Eastern Europe.”
³³⁷

The image many Americans had of Russia was formed in part by the fawning praise of Russia spewed by Henry Luce and all but the most rabid anti-Roosevelt newspapers.
Time
had named Stalin its 1942 Man of the Year. Luce’s saccharine salute to Stalin was purged of any reference to Stalin’s purges. No mention was made of the
Holodomor,
the famine that resulted in the slow death by starvation of several million Ukrainians in the early 1930s. Rather, Stalin faced “immense disorderliness” and “the problems of providing enough food for the people,” which he solved by “collectivizing the farms” and the introduction of “20th century industrial methods” to his “superstitious, illiterate people.” Stalin and the Russians were heroes, and “have fought the best fight so far” against Hitler. No mention was made of England fighting alone for two years while Stalin was in league with Hitler.
Life
displayed acute myopia when it reported that Russians are “one hell of a people” who “think like Americans.” The murderous secret police organization NKVD was described as “a national police force similar to the FBI.” Americans who didn’t read newspapers and magazines could take the measure of Mother Russia in one of the year’s most popular films,
Mission to Moscow,
based on the memoirs of Joseph E. Davies, the former American ambassador to the Kremlin. One reviewer wrote that the film’s “Russians look like fur-coated Americans, and the Soviet Union is pictured as a land of magnificent food and drink, as it probably was in the circles in which the Davieses moved…. Despite its Hollywood flourishes,
Mission to Moscow
has power…. But Franklin Roosevelt and Joe Davies are the ones mainly glorified. Of President Roosevelt, even the Russians speak in hushed, reverent tones.” The movie might have had power, but it was Hollywood fantasy power, though it at least made a passing reference to Stalin’s purges.
³³⁸

Roosevelt had arrived in Tehran firm in his belief that his powers of charm and persuasion would carry the day, although his knowledge of European politics was thin and his knowledge of Russia thinner still. Sir Ian Jacob, describing Roosevelt, used almost the same phrases as did Averell Harriman and George Kennan: “He [Roosevelt] had no idea…. He seemed to imagine that he could handle Stalin.” That he could not became apparent to Churchill as the three leaders worked their way through three more meetings and two dinners, which Cadogan called “woolly and bibulous.” As for Roosevelt’s performance, Cadogan wrote, “[The] President, in his amateurish way, has said a lot of indiscreet and awkward things.”
³³⁹

During their second private meeting, Roosevelt outlined to Stalin his concept of a postwar international organization that would be charged with keeping global peace. It would consist of a General Assembly composed of members of the alliance. Overseeing this assembly would be an executive committee consisting of the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. This committee would deal with nonmilitary matters such as food and health. Stalin (like Churchill) thought China a curious choice as the world’s fourth “great” power, but he did not press the issue. Of the executive committee, Stalin asked, would its decisions be binding? Likely not, Roosevelt replied, as the U.S. Congress would never permit America to be bound by decisions made by such a body. The third branch of the organization would take the form of “The Four Policemen”—Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China—and would be charged with keeping the peace, if necessary by bombing and invading aggressor nations. Stalin listened politely, then steered the discussion to the treatment of Germany. As he had told Churchill the previous evening, Germany, once defeated, must be forcibly kept from reinventing itself as a military power. Yet from what he had heard so far, Roosevelt’s proposed international organization could not supply the safeguards that he, Stalin, thought necessary.
³⁴⁰

No discussion took place about the possibility that one of the Four Policemen might be the aggressor of the future. As with all the talks at all the conferences, the press (never in attendance) were given only broad summaries after the fact. Roosevelt did not publicly unveil his blueprint for a world organization until late May of 1944.

After Roosevelt and Stalin finished their chat and before the start of the second formal session, Churchill, with anthems playing and honor guards standing at attention, presented Stalin with the Sword of Stalingrad, a gold and jewel-encrusted dagger offered as a gift from King George VI, “in token of the homage of the British people… to the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad.” Stalin accepted the sword, and passed it on to Voroshilov, who proceeded to drop it out of its scabbard and onto his great toe. Despite Voroshilov’s gaffe and the obvious discomfort of all present, Churchill later wrote that as the sword was carried out of the room by an honor guard, he spied Roosevelt sitting off to one side, “obviously stirred by the ceremony.” In fact, Roosevelt found such displays of pompous imperial symbolism to be distasteful contrivances. The show meant much to Churchill, little to Roosevelt, and still less to Stalin. British historian Roy Jenkins later noted that Joseph Stalin was not about to accept a jeweled bauble as any sort of substitute for an assault on France.
³⁴¹

Stalin, with characteristic bluntness, said as much a few minutes later at the start of the second plenary session, when he came right at Roosevelt
much as he had come right at Churchill during their second session in Moscow the previous year. “Who will command Overlord?” the marshal demanded. Roosevelt replied that the decision had not been made. Stalin replied that he could hardly take Overlord seriously until it had a commander, and by the same logic, until it had a commander, it would appear the Anglo-Americans were not taking it seriously. He insisted the commander be named within the week. A brief, uncomfortable silence followed. Roosevelt had no answer ready. Churchill then made a gallant attempt to defend the merits of action in Rhodes and Turkey. As for Overlord, he again stressed the conditions that had to be met in order to undertake the invasion, including that of the Germans having no more than twelve divisions in reserve in France on the day of the invasion. Where Churchill saw sound planning and contingencies, Stalin saw equivocation. He interrupted: “I wish to pose a very discreet question to the Prime Minister about Overlord…. Do the Prime Minister and the British Chiefs really believe in Overlord?” Certainly, replied Churchill, given that the conditions as outlined were met. “When the time comes it will be our stern duty to hurl across the channel at the Germans every sinew of our strength.” Given that Stalin and Roosevelt had already agreed upon the date, May 1, Churchill had no choice but to accept the inevitable. Hopkins had warned him that Roosevelt would come down on the side of Stalin, and he had.
³⁴²

Brooke was livid. “After listening to the arguments put forward for the last two days,” he told his diary, “I feel more like entering a lunatic asylum… than continuing with my present job.” And as for the way his boss and Roosevelt had comported themselves in the meeting, “Winston was not good, and Roosevelt even worse.” Stalin, alone but for Voroshilov at the table, and surrounded by twenty-six American and British luminaries, including Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, had taken control of the conference. In what John Keegan called “one of the most brutal contrivances of public embarrassment recorded in diplomatic history,” Stalin had shamed Churchill into conceding his total commitment to Overlord, as well as the need to appoint a commander, and soon.
³⁴³

Stalin hosted that night’s dinner, due to start in just an hour. Churchill, while changing into his evening dress, had Sawyers summon Moran to treat his sore throat, which had lingered now for more than two weeks. Asked by Moran how the day’s business had turned out, Churchill growled, “Nothing more can be done here.” But he held out hope that something could be done with President
nönü and the Turks, whom he planned to meet in Cairo in a few days. With Turkey in, he told Moran, he
could more reasonably argue the case for his Balkan strategy and perhaps a delay in Overlord. He would have developed the thought further, but Stalin awaited his arrival. Sawyers interposed, “You are late, sir.” “Bloody,” Churchill growled, and stomped out.
³⁴⁴

Only the principals and their closest aides attended that night’s feast—Hopkins, Molotov, Eden, Harriman, and Ambassador Clark Kerr. Sarah had not been invited, nor had Elliott Roosevelt. But he successfully crashed the affair by lingering just outside the door until Stalin waved him in. Stalin’s banquets, as Churchill had learned in Moscow, were fueled by prodigious quantities of vodka and wine, and humor of Stalin’s crude variety. The marshal needled Churchill relentlessly throughout the evening, Harriman recalled, and several times implied that Churchill, “nursing some secret affection for the Germans, wanted a soft peace.” Roosevelt listened, smiled, but did not rise to Churchill’s defense. Rather, the president delighted in Churchill’s unease. Roosevelt “always enjoyed other people’s discomfort,” Harriman recalled. “It never bothered him much when other people were unhappy.”
³⁴⁵

Churchill did not rise to the bait until Stalin proposed to shoot at least 50,000 German officers after the surrender in order to ensure Germany’s docility well into the future. “I would rather,” Churchill replied, “be taken out to the garden here and now and be shot myself rather than sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy.” Roosevelt then chimed in with a compromise; he suggested that only 49,000 officers be shot. Eden, meanwhile, was making desperate gestures in Churchill’s direction intended to peg the whole scene as a joke. It might have ended there had not Elliott Roosevelt, by then drunk, wobbled to his feet and endorsed Stalin’s plan, adding that he was sure the U.S. Army would support it.

At that Churchill walked out. He found himself alone in a semidarkened room. A few minutes passed; then he felt hands clasping his shoulders from behind. He turned to find Stalin and Molotov, each smiling broadly. They had “been playing,” they assured Churchill, adding that “nothing of a serious kind had entered their heads.” Stalin had a very captivating way about him when he chose, Churchill recalled, and this was his most captivating moment of all. Still, Churchill later wrote that he “was not then and am not now fully convinced that all was chaff and there was no serious intent lurking behind.” He wrote those words long before the official documents regarding the Katyn massacre were released by HMG. The law forbade him to write what he knew, which was that Stalin and the Politburo were guilty of ordering the NKVD to murder the Polish officers in the Katyn forest. The obtuse reference to “no serious intent lurking” in Stalin’s remarks was as close as he could get to the root of the matter. And of course, the law kept him from telling the world that Roosevelt, too, knew
that Stalin had murdered the Poles. Churchill had sent Roosevelt the very precise and damning Foreign Office report on the matter. Stalin’s joke, if he was joking, was crude but in character. Roosevelt’s participation, given his knowledge of Katyn, was disgraceful.
³⁴⁶

In Cairo, Roosevelt had taken to delivering seemingly good-natured jabs at Churchill during the cocktail hour or at dinner. “Winston,” the president declared one evening, “you have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your English blood, and just don’t understand why a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it.” At Tehran, the ribbing took the form of bullying gibes uttered with forethought solely for the pleasure of Stalin, who joined with Roosevelt in the “teasing,” as Roosevelt biographer Robert Sherwood termed it. It was a shabby display, perhaps to be expected from the coarse Stalin, but not from Churchill’s genteel friend Franklin Roosevelt. As he had after demeaning de Gaulle at Casablanca, Roosevelt took delight in recounting to his cronies back home, including America’s first female cabinet secretary, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the humiliations he inflicted upon Churchill. “As soon as I sat down at the conference table, I began to tease Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits. It began to register with Stalin,” who smiled, and then laughed aloud, as Roosevelt pressed on. Roosevelt said he had felt enough at ease to call Stalin Uncle Joe, which brought forth another guffaw from the marshal. “The ice was broken,” Roosevelt told his cabinet, “and we talked like men and brothers.” Alan Brooke termed Roosevelt’s display a “betrayal.” Years later, Lady Mary Soames offered, “The president’s behavior hurt my father,” but as with all tribulations that came Churchill’s way, “it did not unman him.”
³⁴⁷